ANN ARBOR — Truven Health Analytics, formerly the health care business of Thomson Reuters, today announced an upgrade to its MarketScan Treatment Pathways, a Web-based analytic interface that allows healthcare researchers to access and analyze large healthcare databases without the need for data intake, software or custom programming.

Treatment Pathways 2.0 continues to push the boundaries of patient-level longitudinal analyses that are critical for comparative effectiveness and health services research. This release increases data processing speeds, improves visualization, and enables more collaboration among researchers.

Treatment Pathways 2.0 enables researchers to access, summarize, and analyze more data and also expands visualization of patient treatment flow through the medical system based on diagnoses, procedures, and drug events. The upgrade allows researchers to access data on millions of de-identified patients found in the MarketScan Research Databases, closely define cohorts, identify exposures, and characterize patients demographically and clinically.

The new version of Treatment Pathways offers more flexibility in applying standard analytic methods to new populations, and sharing protocols and results from projects with research colleagues. Users can direct completion of analysis and reporting in Treatment Pathways with charting of demographics, comorbidities, concurrent treatments, frequencies, and distributions.

For the first time, this version of Treatment Pathways allows users to create and export variables into a patient-level analytical file, and then perform analyses with statistical software of the user’s preference. For example, drug utilization and costs can be analyzed at an individual patient level. The number of prescriptions, days’ supply, and costs for selected drugs and time periods can be exported for each patient in the user created cohort of interest.

“For researchers in today’s environment, increased speed-to-answer is the silver bullet,” said Stacey Long, vice president and general manager, pharmaceutical-biotech information solutions, Truven Health Analytics. “With Treatment Pathways version 2.0, we provide our clients a more robust and flexible data offering, and also enhanced analytic capabilities that will literally transform the way research is conducted in large patient-level databases. Complex questions that previously would take weeks of elapsed time to address, can now literally be answered in a matter of minutes, resulting in reduced costs and decreasing the time it takes to get research findings into the field.”

Underlying Treatment Pathways are the MarketScan Research Databases, which contain de-identified healthcare claims data reflecting the real-world medical care of over 170 million unique patients across the U.S. since 1995. For decades, researchers from government, industry, and academia have relied on these databases for information to analyze the cost of care, evaluate the efficacy of medical treatments, understand prescription drug utilization patterns, and research other important healthcare issues. MarketScan Treatment Pathways enables researchers to explore patterns in these rich databases with even greater speed and efficiency.